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In the wake of the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris, western governments are
moving fast to legitimize expanded powers of mass surveillance and
controls on the internet, all in the name of ghting terrorism.
US and European politicians have called to protect NSA-style snooping, and
to advance the capacity to intrude on internet privacy by outlawing
encryption. One idea is to establish a telecoms partnership that would
unilaterally delete content deemed to fuel hatred and violence in
situations considered appropriate. Heated discussions are going on at
government and parliamentary level to explore cracking down on lawyerclient condentiality.
What any of this would have done to prevent the Charlie Hebdo attacks
remains a mystery, especially given that we already know the terrorists
were on the radar of French intelligence for up to a decade.
There is little new in this story. The 9/11 atrocity was the rst of many
terrorist attacks, each succeeded by the dramatic extension of draconian
state powers at the expense of civil liberties, backed up with the projection
of military force in regions identied as hotspots harbouring terrorists. Yet
there is little indication that this tried and tested formula has done
anything to reduce the danger. If anything, we appear to be locked into a
deepening cycle of violence with no clear end in sight.
As our governments push to increase their powers, INSURGE
INTELLIGENCE can now reveal the vast extent to which the US
intelligence community is implicated in nurturing the web platforms we
know today, for the precise purpose of utilizing the technology as a
mechanism to ght global information wara war to legitimize the power
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of the few over the rest of us. The lynchpin of this story is the corporation
that in many ways denes the 21st century with its unobtrusive
omnipresence: Google.
Google styles itself as a friendly, funky, user-friendly tech rm that rose to
prominence through a combination of skill, luck, and genuine innovation.
This is true. But it is a mere fragment of the story. In reality, Google is a
smokescreen behind which lurks the US military-industrial complex.
The inside story of Googles rise, revealed here for the rst time, opens a
can of worms that goes far beyond Google, unexpectedly shining a light on
the existence of a parasitical network driving the evolution of the US
national security apparatus, and proting obscenely from its operation.
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money, they also collaborate where it counts. The Highlands Forum has for
20 years provided an o the record space for some of the most prominent
members of the shadow intelligence community to convene with senior US
government ocials, alongside other leaders in relevant industries.
I rst stumbled upon the existence of this network in November 2014,
when I reported for VICEs Motherboard that US defense secretary Chuck
Hagels newly announced Defense Innovation Initiative was really about
building Skynetor something like it, essentially to dominate an emerging
era of automated robotic warfare.
That story was based on a little-known Pentagon-funded white paper
published two months earlier by the National Defense University (NDU) in
Washington DC, a leading US military-run institution that, among other
things, generates research to develop US defense policy at the highest
levels. The white paper claried the thinking behind the new initiative, and
the revolutionary scientic and technological developments it hoped to
capitalize on.
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the US, and works closely with the US intelligence community, especially
the NSA. According to investigative journalist Tim Shorrock, the rst to
disclose the vast extent of the privatization of US intelligence with his
seminal book Spies for Hire, SAIC has a symbiotic relationship with the
NSA: the agency is the companys largest single customer and SAIC is the
NSAs largest contractor.
The full name of Captain Dick ONeill, the founding president of the
Highlands Forum, is Richard Patrick ONeill, who after his work in the Navy
joined the DoD. He served his last post as deputy for strategy and policy in
the Oce of the Assistant Secretary for Defense for Command, Control,
Communications and Intelligence, before setting up Highlands.
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Information warfare
The Highlands Forum has served as a two-way inuence bridge: on the
one hand, for the shadow network of private contractors to inuence the
formulation of information operations policy across US military
intelligence; and on the other, for the Pentagon to inuence what is going
on in the private sector. There is no clearer evidence of this than the truly
instrumental role of the Forum in incubating the idea of mass surveillance
as a mechanism to dominate information on a global scale.
In 1989, Richard ONeill, then a US Navy cryptologist, wrote a paper for the
US Naval War College, Toward a methodology for perception management. In
his book, Future Wars, Col. John Alexander, then a senior ocer in the US
Armys Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM), records that
ONeills paper for the rst time outlined a strategy for perception
management as part of information warfare (IW). ONeills proposed
strategy identied three categories of targets for IW: adversaries, so they
believe they are vulnerable; potential partners, so they perceive the cause
[of war] as just; and nally, civilian populations and the political
leadership so they perceive the cost as worth the eort. A secret brieng
based on ONeills work made its way to the top leadership at DoD. They
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acknowledged that ONeill was right and told him to bury it.
Except the DoD didnt bury it. Around 1994, the Highlands Group was
founded by ONeill as an ocial Pentagon project at the appointment of
Bill Clintons then defense secretary William Perrywho went on to join
SAICs board of directors after retiring from government in 2003.
In ONeills own words, the group would function as the Pentagons ideas
lab. According to Government Executive, military and information
technology experts gathered at the rst Forum meeting to consider the
impacts of IT and globalization on the United States and on warfare. How
would the Internet and other emerging technologies change the world?
The meeting helped plant the idea of network-centric warfare in the
minds of the nations top military thinkers.
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But Government Executive reported that ONeill and others believed such
regulatory issues would quell the free ow of ideas and no-holds-barred
discussions they sought. Pentagon lawyers had warned that the word
group might necessitate certain obligations and advised running the whole
thing privately: So ONeill renamed it the Highlands Forum and moved
into the private sector to manage it as a consultant to the Pentagon. The
Pentagon Highlands Forum thus runs under the mantle of ONeills
intellectual capital venture rm, Highlands Group Inc.
In 1995, a year after William Perry appointed ONeill to head up the
Highlands Forum, SAICthe Forums partner organizationlaunched a
new Center for Information Strategy and Policy under the direction of
Jerey Cooper, a member of the Highlands Group who advises senior
Defense Department ocials on information warfare issues. The Center
had precisely the same objective as the Forum, to function as a
clearinghouse to bring together the best and brightest minds in
information warfare by sponsoring a continuing series of seminars, papers
and symposia which explore the implications of information warfare in
depth. The aim was to enable leaders and policymakers from
government, industry, and academia to address key issues surrounding
information warfare to ensure that the United States retains its edge over
any and all potential enemies.
Despite FACA regulations, federal advisory committees are already heavily
inuenced, if not captured, by corporate power. So in bypassing FACA, the
Pentagon overrode even the loose restrictions of FACA, by permanently
excluding any possibility of public engagement.
ONeills claim that there are no reports or recommendations is
disingenuous. By his own admission, the secret Pentagon consultations
with industry that have taken place through the Highlands Forum since
1994 have been accompanied by regular presentations of academic and
policy papers, recordings and notes of meetings, and other forms of
documentation that are locked behind a login only accessible by Forum
delegates. This violates the spirit, if not the letter, of FACAin a way that
is patently intended to circumvent democratic accountability and the rule
of law.
The Highlands Forum doesnt need to produce consensus
recommendations. Its purpose is to provide the Pentagon a shadow social
networking mechanism to cement lasting relationships with corporate
power, and to identify new talent, that can be used to ne-tune information
warfare strategies in absolute secrecy.
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data-mining in counter-terrorism.
In her University of Texas article, she attaches the copy of an abstract of
the US intelligence communitys MDDS program that had been presented
to the Annual Intelligence Community Symposium in 1995. The abstract
reveals that the primary sponsors of the MDDS programme were three
agencies: the NSA, the CIAs Oce of Research & Development, and the
intelligence communitys Community Management Sta (CMS) which
operates under the Director of Central Intelligence. Administrators of the
program, which provided funding of around 34 million dollars per year for
34 years, were identied as Hal Curran (NSA), Robert Kluttz (CMS), Dr.
Claudia Pierce (NSA), Dr. Rick Steinheiser (ORDstanding for the CIAs
Oce of Research and Devepment), and Dr. Thuraisingham herself.
Thuraisingham goes on in her article to reiterate that this joint CIA-NSA
program partly funded Sergey Brin to develop the core of Google, through a
grant to Stanford managed by Brins supervisor Prof. Jerey D. Ullman:
In fact, the Google founder Mr. Sergey Brin was partly funded by this program
while he was a PhD student at Stanford. He together with his advisor Prof. Jerey
Ullman and my colleague at MITRE, Dr. Chris Clifton [Mitres chief scientist in
IT], developed the Query Flocks System which produced solutions for mining
large amounts of data stored in databases. I remember visiting Stanford with Dr.
Rick Steinheiser from the Intelligence Community and Mr. Brin would rush in on
roller blades, give his presentation and rush out. In fact the last time we met in
September 1998, Mr. Brin demonstrated to us his search engine which became
Google soon after.
Brin and Page ocially incorporated Google as a company in September
1998, the very month they last reported to Thuraisingham and Steinheiser.
Query Flocks was also part of Googles patented PageRank search
system, which Brin developed at Stanford under the CIA-NSA-MDDS
programme, as well as with funding from the NSF, IBM and Hitachi. That
year, MITREs Dr. Chris Clifton, who worked under Thuraisingham to
develop the Query Flocks system, co-authored a paper with Brins
superviser, Prof. Ullman, and the CIAs Rick Steinheiser. Titled Knowledge
Discovery in Text, the paper was presented at an academic conference.
The MDDS funding that supported Brin was signicant as far as
seed-funding goes, but it was probably outweighed by the other funding
streams, said Thuraisingham. The duration of Brins funding was around
two years or so. In that period, I and my colleagues from the MDDS would
visit Stanford to see Brin and monitor his progress every three months or
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so. We didnt supervise exactly, but we did want to check progress, point
out potential problems and suggest ideas. In those briengs, Brin did
present to us on the query ocks research, and also demonstrated to us
versions of the Google search engine.
Brin thus reported to Thuraisingham and Steinheiser regularly about his
work developing Google. The MDDS programme is actually referenced in
several papers co-authored by Brin and Page while at Stanford. In their
1998 paper published in the Bulletin of the IEEE Computer Society Technical
Committeee on Data Engineering, they describe the automation of methods
to extract information from the web via Dual Iterative Pattern Relation
Extraction, the development of a global ranking of Web pages called
PageRank, and the use of PageRank to develop a novel search engine
called Google. Through an opening footnote, Sergey Brin conrms he was
Partially supported by the Community Management Sta s Massive
Digital Data Systems Program, through an NSF grantconrming that
the CIA-NSA-MDDS program provided its funding through the NSF.
This grant, whose project report lists Brin among the students supported
(without mentioning the MDDS), was dierent to the NSF grant to Larry
Page that included funding from DARPA and NASA. The project report,
authored by Brins supervisor Prof. Ullman, goes on to say under the
section Indications of Success that there are some new stories of startups
based on NSF-supported research. Under Project Impact, the report
remarks: Finally, the google project has also gone commercial as
Google.com.
Thuraisinghams account therefore demonstrates that the CIA-NSA-MDDS
program was not only funding Brin throughout his work with Larry Page
developing Google, but that senior US intelligence representatives
including a CIA ocial oversaw the evolution of Google in this pre-launch
phase, all the way until the company was ready to be ocially founded.
Google, then, had been enabled with a signicant amount of seed-funding
and oversight from the Pentagon: namely, the CIA, NSA, and DARPA.
The DoD could not be reached for comment.
When I asked Prof. Ullman to conrm whether or not Brin was partly
funded under the intelligence communitys MDDS program, and whether
Ullman was aware that Brin was regularly brieng the CIAs Rick
Steinheiser on his progress in developing the Google search engine,
Ullmans responses were evasive: May I know whom you represent and
why you are interested in these issues? Who are your sources? He also
denied that Brin played a signicant role in developing the query ocks
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system, although it is clear from Brins papers that he did draw on that
work in co-developing the PageRank system with Page.
When I asked Ullman whether he was denying the US intelligence
communitys role in supporting Brin during the development of Google, he
said: I am not going to dignify this nonsense with a denial. If you wont
explain what your theory is, and what point you are trying to make, I am
not going to help you in the slightest.
The MDDS abstract published online at the University of Texas conrms
that the rationale for the CIA-NSA project was to provide seed money to
develop data management technologies which are of high-risk and
high-pay-o, including techniques for querying, browsing, and ltering;
transaction processing; accesses methods and indexing; metadata
management and data modelling; and integrating heterogeneous databases;
as well as developing appropriate architectures. The ultimate vision of the
program was to provide for the seamless access and fusion of massive
amounts of data, information and knowledge in a heterogeneous, real-time
environment for use by the Pentagon, intelligence community and
potentially across government.
These revelations corroborate the claims of Robert Steele, former senior
CIA ocer and a founding civilian deputy director of the Marine Corps
Intelligence Activity, whom I interviewed for The Guardian last year on
open source intelligence. Citing sources at the CIA, Steele had said in 2006
that Steinheiser, an old colleague of his, was the CIAs main liaison at
Google and had arranged early funding for the pioneering IT rm. At the
time, Wired founder John Batelle managed to get this ocial denial from a
Google spokesperson in response to Steeles assertions:
The statements related to Google are completely untrue.
This time round, despite multiple requests and conversations, a Google
spokesperson declined to comment.
UPDATE: As of 5.41PM GMT, Googles director of corporate
communication got in touch and asked me to include the following
statement:
Sergey Brin was not part of the Query Flocks Program at Stanford, nor were
any of his projects funded by US Intelligence bodies.
This is what I wrote back:
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My response to that statement would be as follows: Brin himself in his own paper
acknowledges funding from the Community Management Sta of the Massive
Digital Data Systems (MDDS) initiative, which was supplied through the NSF.
The MDDS was an intelligence community program set up by the CIA and NSA. I
also have it on record, as noted in the piece, from Prof. Thuraisingham of
University of Texas that she managed the MDDS program on behalf of the US
intelligence community, and that her and the CIAs Rick Steinheiser met Brin
every three months or so for two years to be briefed on his progress developing
Google and PageRank. Whether Brin worked on query ocks or not is neither here
nor there.
In that context, you might want to consider the following questions:
1) Does Google deny that Brins work was part-funded by the MDDS via an NSF
grant?
2) Does Google deny that Brin reported regularly to Thuraisingham and
Steinheiser from around 1996 to 1998 until September that year when he
presented the Google search engine to them?
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community.
Those connections include Michele Weslander Quaid, an ex-CIA contractor
and former senior Pentagon intelligence ocial who is now Googles chief
technology ocer where she is developing programs to best t
government agencies needs; Elizabeth Churchill, Google director of user
experience; James Kuner, a humanoid robotics expert who now heads up
Googles robotics division and who introduced the term cloud robotics;
Mark Drapeau, director of innovation engagement for Microsofts public
sector business; Lili Cheng, general manager of Microsofts Future Social
Experiences (FUSE) Labs; Jon Udell, Microsoft evangelist; Cory Ondrejka,
vice president of engineering at Facebook; to name just a few.
In 2010, Google signed a multi-billion dollar no-bid contract with the NSAs
sister agency, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA). The
contract was to use Google Earth for visualization services for the NGA.
Google had developed the software behind Google Earth by purchasing
Keyhole from the CIA venture rm In-Q-Tel.
Then a year after, in 2011, another of ONeills Google Plus connections,
Michele Quaidwho had served in executive positions at the NGA,
National Reconnaissance Oce and the Oce of the Director of National
Intelligenceleft her government role to become Google innovation
evangelist and the point-person for seeking government contracts. Quaids
last role before her move to Google was as a senior representative of the
Director of National Intelligence to the Intelligence, Surveillance, and
Reconnaissance Task Force, and a senior advisor to the undersecretary of
defense for intelligences director of Joint and Coalition Warghter
Support (J&CWS). Both roles involved information operations at their
core. Before her Google move, in other words, Quaid worked closely with
the Oce of the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, to which the
Pentagons Highlands Forum is subordinate. Quaid has herself attended the
Forum, though precisely when and how often I could not conrm.
In March 2012, then DARPA director Regina Duganwho in that capacity
was also co-chair of the Pentagon Highlands Forumfollowed her
colleague Quaid into Google to lead the companys new Advanced
Technology and Projects Group. During her Pentagon tenure, Dugan led on
strategic cyber security and social media, among other initiatives. She was
responsible for focusing an increasing portion of DARPAs work on the
investigation of oensive capabilities to address military-specic needs,
securing $500 million of government funding for DARPA cyber research
from 2012 to 2017.
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Regina Dugan, former head of DARPA and Highlands Forum co-chair, now a
senior Google executivetrying her best to look the part
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documents, including one from the Oce of the Chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Sta, showing that Persistent Surveillance was a fundamental
theme of the information-centric vision for defense policy across the
Pentagon.
We now know that just two months before ONeills address at Harvard in
2001, under the TIA program, President Bush had secretly authorized the
NSAs domestic surveillance of Americans without court-approved
warrants, in what appears to have been an illegal modication of the
ThinThread data-mining projectas later exposed by NSA whistleblowers
William Binney and Thomas Drake.
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The following year, John Poindexter, who had proposed and run the TIA
surveillance program via his post at DARPA, was in Singapore participating
in the Highlands 2004 Island Forum. Other delegates included then
Highlands Forum co-chair and Pentagon CIO Linton Wells; president of
notorious Pentagon information warfare contractor, John Rendon; Karl
Lowe, director of the Joint Forces Command (JFCOM) Joint Advanced
Warghting Division; Air Vice Marshall Stephen Dalton, capability manager
for information superiority at the UK Ministry of Defense; Lt. Gen. Johan
Kihl, Swedish army Supreme Commander HQs chief of sta; among
others.
As of 2006, SAIC had been awarded a multi-million dollar NSA contract to
develop a big data-mining project called ExecuteLocus, despite the colossal
$1 billion failure of its preceding contract, known as Trailblazer. Core
components of TIA were being quietly continued under new code
names, according to Foreign Policys Shane Harris, but had been concealed
behind the veil of the classied intelligence budget. The new surveillance
program had by then been fully transitioned from DARPAs jurisdiction to
the NSA.
This was also the year of yet another Singapore Island Forum led by
Richard ONeill on behalf of the Pentagon, which included senior defense
and industry ocials from the US, UK, Australia, France, India and Israel.
Participants also included senior technologists from Microsoft, IBM, as
well as Gilman Louie, partner at technology investment rm Alsop Louie
Partners.
Gilman Louie is a former CEO of In-Q-Telthe CIA rm investing
especially in start-ups developing data mining technology. In-Q-Tel was
founded in 1999 by the CIAs Directorate of Science and Technology, under
which the Oce of Research and Development (ORD)which was part of
the Google-funding MDSS programhad operated. The idea was to
essentially replace the functions once performed by the ORD, by mobilizing
the private sector to develop information technology solutions for the
entire intelligence community.
Louie had led In-Q-Tel from 1999 until January 2006including when
Google bought Keyhole, the In-Q-Tel-funded satellite mapping software.
Among his colleagues on In-Q-Tels board in this period were former
DARPA director and Highlands Forum co-chair Anita Jones (who is still
there), as well as founding board member William Perry: the man who had
appointed ONeill to set-up the Highlands Forum in the rst place. Joining
Perry as a founding In-Q-Tel board member was John Seely Brown, then
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chief scientist at Xerox Corp and director of its Palo Alto Research Center
(PARC) from 1990 to 2002, who is also a long-time senior Highlands Forum
member since inception.
In addition to the CIA, In-Q-Tel has also been backed by the FBI, NGA, and
Defense Intelligence Agency, among other agencies. More than 60 percent
of In-Q-Tels investments under Louies watch were in companies that
specialize in automatically collecting, sifting through and understanding
oceans of information, according to Medill School of Journalisms News21,
which also noted that Louie himself had acknowledged it was not clear
whether privacy and civil liberties will be protected by governments use
of these technologies for national security.
The transcript of Richard ONeills late 2001 seminar at Harvard shows that
the Pentagon Highlands Forum had rst engaged Gilman Louie long before
the Island Forum, in fact, shortly after 9/11 to explore whats going on with
In-Q-Tel. That Forum session focused on how to take advantage of the
speed of the commercial market that wasnt present inside the science and
technology community of Washington and to understand the
implications for the DoD in terms of the strategic review, the QDR, Hill
action, and the stakeholders. Participants of the meeting included senior
military people, combatant commanders, several of the senior ag
ocers, some defense industry people and various US representatives
including Republican Congressman William Mac Thornberry and Democrat
Senator Joseph Lieberman.
Both Thornberry and Lieberman are staunch supporters of NSA
surveillance, and have consistently acted to rally support for pro-war,
pro-surveillance legislation. ONeills comments indicate that the Forums
role is not just to enable corporate contractors to write Pentagon policy,
but to rally political support for government policies adopted through the
Forums informal brand of shadow networking.
Repeatedly, ONeill told his Harvard audience that his job as Forum
president was to scope case studies from real companies across the private
sector, like eBay and Human Genome Sciences, to gure out the basis of US
Information Superiorityhow to dominate the information market
and leverage this for what the president and the secretary of defense
wanted to do with regard to transformation of the DoD and the strategic
review.
By 2007, a year after the Island Forum meeting that included Gilman Louie,
Facebook received its second round of $12.7 million worth of funding from
Accel Partners. Accel was headed up by James Breyer, former chair of the
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But heres the kicker. In 2011, it was Lee who engineered Facebooks $50
billion valuation, and previously handled deals for other Highlandsconnected tech giants like Google, Microsoft and eBay. Lees then boss,
Stephen Friedman, a former CEO and chairman of Goldman Sachs, and
later senior partner on the rms executive board, was a also founding
board member of In-Q-Tel alongside Highlands Forum overlord William
Perry and Forum member John Seely Brown.
In 2001, Bush appointed Stephen Friedman to the Presidents Intelligence
Advisory Board, and then to chair that board from 2005 to 2009. Friedman
previously served alongside Paul Wolfowitz and others on the 19956
presidential commission of inquiry into US intelligence capabilities, and in
1996 on the Jeremiah Panel that produced a report to the Director of the
National Reconnaisance Oce (NRO)one of the surveillance agencies
plugged into the Highlands Forum. Friedman was on the Jeremiah Panel
with Martin Faga, then senior vice president and general manager of
MITRE Corps Center for Integrated Intelligence Systemswhere
Thuraisingham, who managed the CIA-NSA-MDDS program that inspired
DARPA counter-terrorist data-mining, was also a lead engineer.
In the footnotes to a chapter for the book, Cyberspace and National Security
(Georgetown University Press), SAIC/Leidos executive Je Cooper reveals
that another Goldman Sachs senior partner Philip J. Venableswho as
chief information risk ocer leads the rms programs on information
securitydelivered a Highlands Forum presentation in 2008 at what was
called an Enrichment Session on Deterrence. Coopers chapter draws on
Venables presentation at Highlands with permission. In 2010, Venables
participated with his then boss Friedman at an Aspen Institute meeting on
the world economy. For the last few years, Venables has also sat on various
NSA cybersecurity award review boards.
In sum, the investment rm responsible for creating the billion dollar
fortunes of the tech sensations of the 21st century, from Google to
Facebook, is intimately linked to the US military intelligence community;
with Venables, Lee and Friedman either directly connected to the Pentagon
Highlands Forum, or to senior members of the Forum.
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MIIS Cysecs director, Dr, Itamara Lochard, has long been embedded in
Highlands. She regularly presents current research on non-state groups,
governance, technology and conict to the US Oce of the Secretary of
Defense Highlands Forum, according to her Tufts University bio. She also,
regularly advises US combatant commanders and specializes in studying
the use of information technology by violent and non-violent sub-state
groups.
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Her views thus disclose much about what the Highlands Forum has been
advocating all these years. In 2004, Lochard was co-author of a study for
the US Air Forces Institute for National Security Studies on US strategy
toward non-state armed groups. The study on the one hand argued that
non-state armed groups should be urgently recognized as a tier one
security priority, and on the other that the proliferation of armed groups
provide strategic opportunities that can be exploited to help achieve
policy goals. There have and will be instances where the United States may
nd collaborating with armed group is in its strategic interests. But
sophisticated tools must be developed to dierentiate between dierent
groups and understand their dynamics, to determine which groups should
be countered, and which could be exploited for US interests. Armed group
proles can likewise be employed to identify ways in which the United
States may assist certain armed groups whose success will be advantageous
to US foreign policy objectives.
In 2008, Wikileaks published a leaked restricted US Army Special
Operations eld manual, which demonstrated that the sort of thinking
advocated by the likes of Highlands expert Lochard had been explicitly
adopted by US special forces.
Lochards work thus demonstrates that the Highlands Forum sat at the
intersection of advanced Pentagon strategy on surveillance, covert
operations and irregular warfare: mobilizing mass surveillance to develop
detailed information on violent and non-violent groups perceived as
potentially threatening to US interests, or oering opportunities for
exploitation, thus feeding directly into US covert operations.
That, ultimately, is why the CIA, the NSA, the Pentagon, spawned Google.
So they could run their secret dirty wars with even greater eciency than
ever before.
READ PART TWO
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Nafeez has also written for The Independent, Sydney Morning Herald, The Age,
The Scotsman, Foreign Policy, The Atlantic, Quartz, Prospect, New Statesman,
Le Monde diplomatique, New Internationalist, Counterpunch, Truthout, among
others. He is the author of A Users Guide to the Crisis of Civilization: And How
to Save It (2010), and the sci thriller novel ZERO POINT, among other books.
His work on the root causes and covert operations linked to international
terrorism ocially contributed to the 9/11 Commission and the 7/7 Coroners
Inquest.
This exclusive is being released for free in the public interest, and was
enabled by crowdfunding. Id like to thank my amazing community of
patrons for their support, which gave me the opportunity to work on
this in-depth investigation. Please support independent, investigative
journalism for the global commons.
WR I T TE N O N JA N 22 BY
Nafeez Ahmed
investigative journo, international security
scholar | author ZERO POINT scifi thriller
http://zro.pt | film CRISIS
http://crisisofcivilization.com
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